TY - JOUR
AU - Dillon, Michele
AB - The dramatic nature of social change in Quebec is a fascinating story skillfully told by Geneviève Zubrzycki in this beautifully written and deeply researched book, Beheading the Saint: Nationalism, Religion, and Secularism in Quebec. The secularization of Quebec is dramatic in two senses. It occurred in a relatively compressed interval, conveyed for example by the fact that the birth rate dropped from 4.0 to 2.09 within the space of 12 years (between 1959 and 1972). It is dramatic too in that its process of becoming secular was acted out, literally, in public performances—and it is this performance work that drives much of the book. What a treat! Zubrzycki, keenly attuned to cultural icons and their dynamic centrality to the construction and contestation of collective identities (already on fine display in her earlier book, The Crosses of Auschwitz), attends here to St. John the Baptist. It was he who, for many good reasons, became the figure-head in the making of a distinctively Catholic and French Canadian identity, with the Church at the center of institutional and everyday activity (chapter 2). His feast day, June 24, became Quebec’s ethno-national holiday and, happily coinciding with summer solstice, was celebrated with elaborate pageant-like public parades, festivals, and bonfires, as well as special Masses and commemorative medals. Processions, protests, and parades are a focal point of Zubrzycki’s analysis, and she presents a generous array of photos and illustrations to trace and decode the signified meanings of John the Baptist in enacted (including subverted) identity performances. Thus parade floats and their specially chosen participants and tableaus actively produce and are full of highly resonant meanings. Throughout her analysis, she keeps in play the key tropes of Quebecois national identity: the family; the lamb (rural and Catholic) which in the push to secularism becomes the sheep; the soil; the flag; and anticolonialism and language. Each is explained in discrete “transtemporal essays” (27) inserted between chapters, and their significance persuasively integrated into the narrative of historical events elaborated across the book. A key argument is that symbols produce change: they are not merely significant symbols of particular solidarities. And the intellectual achievement of Beheading the Saint is its successful demonstration of how symbols—in parades, posters, poetry, art, political discourse, and on living room walls and in civic institutions—produce change. The first half of the book focuses on the cultural production of a national Catholic/French-Canadian identity, and the second half, the production of a secular Quebecois identity. But identity making, as Zubrzycki elaborates, also invariably entails “iconoclastic unmaking” (e.g., chapter 3) and “iconographic remaking” (e.g., chapter 4) and, at times, the subversion of particular identities. Identity is deeply entangled within a given cultural-historical context. The identity work of the mid-nineteenth century, therefore, and the symbolic materials useful to its processes are/were different from those of the 1970s. The “aesthetic revolt” of the 1960s—which culminated in the public beheading of the papier-mache statue of John the Baptist (in the June 1969 parade)—“killed Catholic French Canadianness” (104). This opened up space for Quebec to work on producing a new national aesthetic as a secular cosmopolitan society stripped of religion. Its cosmopolitan ethos is challenged today however, Zubrzycki argues, by the politics of religious accommodation (chapter 5). This is a story not only about immigration and religious others (e.g., Muslims), but also about what it means to be secular. As Weber and Parsons recognized, the secular and the religious are culturally entwined in Western society. Thus, as Zubrzycki discusses, the negotiation of a so-called “cultural patrimony” that is inclusive of a particular religious tradition and its symbols (e.g., the crucifix), alongside the articulation of secular rights and prohibitions (e.g., religious freedom vs. prohibitions on publicly conspicuous religious symbols) is fraught with tension, ambiguity, and contradictions. In Quebec, as elsewhere, it calls for bold and creative performances across multiple sites, as Zubrzycki shows (179). Zubrzycki’s analytical attention to visual materials is exemplary. Visual culture, she notes, is “refined in the social relationships between viewers as well as between the viewers and the objects viewed” (19). In this spirit, I have a different take on one of the photos. A float of a formally presented and well-dressed family in their living room, she suggests, most likely represents the nightly ritual of saying the rosary—broadcast on radio every night at 7 p.m. (71–72). Might it alternatively be read as a family ready for Sunday Mass (dressed in their Sunday-best, and not on their knees and in untidy workaday clothes)? Either reading is analytically rich, but with different implications perhaps for how secularization processes are impeded and unfold. This book is a must-read for anyone interested in religion, nationalism, culture, politics, and research methods. © The Author(s) 2018. Published by Oxford University Press on behalf of the Association for the Sociology of Religion. All rights reserved. For permissions, please e-mail: journals.permissions@oup.com.
TI - Beheading the Saint: Nationalism, Religion, and Secularism in Quebec, by GENEVIÈVE ZUBRZYCKI
JF - Sociology of Religion: A Quarterly Review
DO - 10.1093/socrel/srx064
DA - 2018-04-01
UR - https://www.deepdyve.com/lp/oxford-university-press/beheading-the-saint-nationalism-religion-and-secularism-in-quebec-by-NSpZEG1GL4
SP - 135
EP - 136
VL - 79
IS - 1
DP - DeepDyve
ER -